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The hard drive also contained personal contact information for about 250 HRSDC employees.

Brampton resident Andrea Taylor, 29, with her daughter Abby, 2, became the victim of digital security breach when the HRSDC lost the personal info of about 583,000 people who had Canada Student Loans. (LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR)

"We want to assure Canadians that we are taking every step possible to protect their privacy,” Human Resources Minister Diane Finley said in question period on Wednesday. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

The government notified the federal privacy commissioner — whose office is investigating the incident — and referred the matter to the RCMP before telling the public about it on Jan. 11.

THE VICTIMS

Andrea Taylor has too much to lose.

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The radiation technologist from Brampton, Ont., who spent more than two hours on hold with a credit bureau after discovering she was one of the people whose personal information was on the missing hard drive, plans to shell out about $15 per month for the rest of her life to pay for a credit monitoring service.

“I don’t see any other way around it, to be quite honest,” said Taylor, 29, who has a 2-year-old daughter and is expecting a second child in a couple of months.

“I have worked really hard to have a really good credit score. My (student loan) is almost paid off. I have a house, a car. I have too many things to lose,” said Taylor.

Nearly 138,000 people have called a hotline set up by HRSDC to find out whether they were one of the people affected by the privacy breach.

About 48 per cent of them received bad news.

A spokeswoman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley stressed there is no evidence yet that anyone has done anything nasty with the data.

“We have no reason to believe that the information has been or will be used for fraudulent purposes and that’s important for people to know,” Alyson Queen said in an interview.

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CREDIT PROTECTION

HRSDC signed a contract with Equifax Canada to provide a six-year credit flagging service to those affected, if they so wish.

This is similar to the standard credit flag that Equifax will put on your file if your wallet was stolen, which costs about $5 in Ontario and Manitoba and is free everywhere else. The service alerts lenders to the potential for fraud and prompts them to ask for more information to verify your identity.

TransUnion Canada recently began charging $5 for it everywhere.

So, what did HRSDC pay for?

Equifax Canada spokesman Tom Carroll wrote in an email that HRSDC purchased a “customized processing solution,” which means Equifax can add the flag en masse, quickly, instead of people having to do it on their own one person at a time. Carroll said Equifax has also “dedicated call-centre support for this specific incident and affected individuals” if anyone needs to check out any suspicious activity.

Carroll also noted that contrary to popular belief, Canadian consumers are actually allowed to access their credit file as many times as they want per year, without cost, although there is a fee if they choose to do so through the website instead of through the mail.

SOCIAL MEDIA

About 2,500 people have joined a closed Facebook group for borrowers who are affected by the privacy breach, which has an active message board where members share news, ask each other questions and vent their anger at the government.

“I am so proud of the people in this group, they have stood up and spoken out against this government and that takes courage,” Amanda Thoy, from Charlottetown, P.E.I., who set up the group, wrote in an email. “One of the members (told me) she never voted before but she will vote at the next election.”

Mark Fillier, 43, who borrowed from the Canada Student Loan Program to study computer programming at Georgian College in Barrie, Ont., also set up a website for the group to help publicize their stories.

“That is what my student loans paid for — how to do that type of stuff!” said Fillier, who lives in Ottawa.

Bob Buckingham, a lawyer in St. John’s, N.L., who filed a class-action lawsuit against the government over the privacy breach in Federal Court, said social media has played a role in directing people to it, noting about 18,250 people had expressed interest so far.

THE POLITICIANS

“We want to assure Canadians that we are taking every step possible to protect their privacy, to protect their information in the future, because that is what they deserve,” Finley said in question period on Wednesday after she was asked when the department lost the hard drive.

“Clearly this government was more interested in protecting its own than ensuring the public interest was protected, so they burnt all the goodwill they could have had,” said NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay).

“Really all the government is offering is a heads up and a good luck,” said Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner (Cape Breton — Canso).

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